The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation

by Cory Doctorow

But network effects are merely how Big Tech gets big. Switching costs are how Big Tech stays big.

Enter the trustbusters, led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Act, America’s first antitrust law. In arguing for his bill, Sherman said to the Senate: “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”

As Peter Thiel puts it, “Competition is for losers.”

The fight for a free, fair and open digital future isn’t more important than any of those other fights, but it is foundational. Tech is the terrain on which our future fights will be fought. If we can’t seize the means of computation, we will lose the fight before it is even joined.

Nor did the DoJ like it when companies tied their software to their hardware, so IBM decided not to make its own PC operating system. IBM chairman John Opel asked a friend who served with him on the board of the United Way if she knew anyone who could provide an OS for his company’s PC. Her name was Mary Gates, and her son, Bill Gates, had a company that fit the bill: Micro-Soft. (They dropped the hyphen later.)

Facebook treats you terribly, but that’s not because you’re not its customer. They treat you terribly because they treat everyone terribly. They’re a monstrous company.

The looser the matching, the more false positives. This is an especial problem for classical musicians: their performances of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart inevitably sound an awful lot like the recordings that Sony Music (the world’s largest classical music label) has claimed in Content ID. As a result, it has become nearly impossible to earn a living off of online classical performance: your videos are either blocked, or the ad revenue they generate is shunted to Sony. Even teaching classical music performance has become a minefield, as painstakingly produced, free online lessons are blocked by Content ID or, if the label is feeling generous, the lessons are left online but the ad revenue they earn is shunted to a giant corporation, stealing the creative wages of a music teacher.

Every time we deputize tech companies with government-like enforcement duties, we make it that much harder to cut them down to size (because they need to be big to fulfill those duties) and that much harder for smaller tech to offer better, more user-centric services (because small tech companies, startups, co-ops, nonprofits and individual tinkerers can’t afford to comply with the regulations that force them to police their users’ conduct).

I’m not saying that communities that moderate themselves will always get it right. I’m saying that communities moderated by distant, unaccountable moderators will never get it right—and that communities that moderate themselves have a chance of getting it right.

When James Comey—now famous for his turn as head of the FBI through the 2016 Trump election—was made US attorney for the Southern District of New York, he gathered his prosecutors and asked who among them had never lost a case. When many of the lawyers proudly raised their hands, Comey called them “the Chickenshit Club.” They had only ever turned their enforcement powers on villains who couldn’t defend themselves, rather than prioritizing the worst offenders, whose ill-gotten gains provided them with the war chest they needed to exact huge resource costs from the State of New York if it tried to hold them to account.

Despite this weak enforcement (and despite shoehorned, ill-starred clauses in the GDPR like the “right to be forgotten”), the core of the GDPR is solid. It says that online service providers may not capture, store or process your data without your enthusiastic, freely given consent.

But Facebook’s terrorist watchlist can’t be held to public account, because Facebook isn’t a public institution, and its watchlist is a private, self-regulated initiative that its competitors have voluntarily signed up for. It is a shadow court, a star chamber, and it’s run by people with a track record of abusing their power (one of the executives accused of personally accepting bribes is Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom).

Google made a mistake. So do judges. When judges make mistakes, you have the theoretical possibility of appealing. When Google makes a mistake, you don’t even get that theoretical chance.

The problems that blockchain technologies say they will fix are inevitably not the problems that I’m worried about.

I have attended hundreds of conference talks and presentations on the subjects of this book, and a few stand out as significant: • Yochai Benkler: After Selfishness—Wikipedia 1, Hobbes 0 at Half Time (Berkman Klein Center) • Sumana Harihareswara: What Would Open Source Look Like if It Were Healthy? (Github) • How Markets Co-opted Free Software’s Most Powerful Weapon (Benjamin Mako Hill, LibrePlanet)

There are far more podcasts worth your time than you can possibly listen to, but there are some that anyone interested in tech criticism really should tune in to, including Trashfuture, Tech Will Not Save Us and This Machine Kills.

On tech and competition, I recommend the blog Naked Capitalism and Matt St...

Start with my Electronic Frontier Foundation and Verso colleague Jillian C. York’s Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism, the best work on content moderation and speech in a global context, hands down.

For an equally ruthless insider’s takedown of startup culture, read Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism.